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Rod Liddle

I’m not sure what the cool cuisine is in London this week. Maybe it’s Kazak, and some young actor or chef or debutante has already opened a restaurant in Chelsea Wharf where the signature dish is boiled mutton in fermented yak’s milk, served to a bunch of PR-kitten customers, who squat on the floor surrounded by artsy photographs of irradiated peasants with bleeding gums.

Stranger things have happened, after all. We have had Tibetan cuisine — like Chinese food, except you get beaten up every now and again. And there was a recent, rather disconcerting, revival in Ethiopian cuisine, which, mercifully, I avoided. I had the horrible idea that you would be forced to sit in some compound for six months, flies buzzing around, until Bob Geldof turned up with a sack of maize. Actually, I have tried Ethiopian food. It’s basically curry eaten with a huge damp flannel. You can